For Gaza's Children is a scream of protest against the oppression of Palestinians by those who have suffered oppression themselves. It is a cry from the heart against the destruction, dispossession and killing of children and civilian adults in the latest War on Gaza by Israel.
“Gaza’s children’s lives do matter to God,” writes Rev. Dr. Marshall Elijah Hatch, Sr., senior pastor at New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago. “Their lives matter with the same revelation and intensity of the Black Lives Matter movement post George Floyd.”
According to reports gathered by the United Nations, a total of more than 48,000 Palestinians—more than 13,000 of them children—have died in the war in the 17 months since the attack by Hamas-led militant groups that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and took 251 hostages.
“To be clear,” writes Ezra Hyland, a University of Minnesota literature professor, “the attack of October 7, 2023, was wrong, morally, tacitly, and spiritually. There is no scenario in which attacking civilians and taking hostages is justifiable. But as Martin Luther King Jr. stated more and more near the end of his time on earth, ‘violence is the language of the unheard.’”
Although he also condemns the attack, Molefi Kete Asante, author of Africa’s Gifts of the Spirit, writes, “Nevertheless, the Israeli government cannot get a pass to starve, freeze, or bomb innocent Palestinians and call that justice or the road to peace.” Arguing for a two-state solution, he continues:
“Children are dying and suffering in Palestine. They are our children because we are human and no human who accepts human dignity can abandon the children of Gaza….Gaza is an open wound on the conscience of the world.”
For Gaza's Children: Black, Brown and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out is published by Third World Press on Chicago’s South Side, the largest and oldest Black press in the nation, founded and still operated by prominent Black poet Haki Madhubuti.
It offers 22 essays and 13 poems from such writers as Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, and Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and was edited by Madhubuti; Keith Gilyard, a Penn State professor of English and African American studies; and Marc Lamont Hill, a social justice activist and professor of anthropology and urban education at City University of New York Graduate Center.
“A Moral Obscenity”
Friedman, who is Jewish, criticizes the knee-jerk reaction to blame Palestinians for their own suffering:
“As soon as someone starts talking about Israel injuring or killing thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including children, the We-Stand-With-Israel hallelujah choir sings, ‘Hamas started it! So whoever Israel kills, Hamas bears all responsibility for those deaths!’ Do they hear themselves? This logic is a moral obscenity, absolving Israel of both agency and responsibility for literally anything it does in Gaza.”
Another Jew, Jonathan Tilove, a news reporter for nearly half a century, writes that he grew up “in the shadow of the Holocaust which bound Jews together amid a chastened world.” A year ago, he went to visit his daughter Aria in Berlin, and they took a side trip to their family’s former town Bialystok. Nearby was the site of the Nazi concentration camp of Treblinka.
Later, at a Jewish museum, he saw the photo of a young victim of the camps who looked like his daughter and another of a boy at Auschwitz who was “my precise likeness.” This was at a time when more than 60 Palestinian children a day were dying in the Israeli attacks on Gaza, and Tilove writes:
“In the name of security, it was making every Jew on the planet less safe, none more so than those living in Israel, and all of us implicitly complicit. Trauma begetting trauma, in perpetuity. I wept for my doppelganger and his little brother. I wept for the children of Gaza being slaughtered in his, and our, name. I wept as a Jew. I wept for the Jews.”
Maulana Karenga, chair of the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, writes that Black Americans feel a kinship with the Palestinians:
“We came from a people who know what it is like to be terrorized, targeted and killed, at every site: on lonely roads and busy streets, in fields, forests and swamps, in our homes,..."
“We came from a people who know what it is like to be terrorized, targeted and killed, at every site: on lonely roads and busy streets, in fields, forests and swamps, in our homes, schools and universities, churches, mosques and temples, in parks and playgrounds, workplaces, cars and convenience stores…So, we need no instruction, advice or additional information on the pernicious pathology of racist and religious hatred and hostility and the will of the ruling race and class, all turned into public policy and socially sanctioned practice.”
The writers in For Gaza’s Children, she writes, “speak here then in defense and support of the Palestinian people vulnerable to a ruthless invading and occupying army and its supporting population…”
The Oppressor’s Playbook
The playbook of the oppressor, writes Madhubuti in his poem “The Secrets of the Victors,” is the same no matter where the oppression takes place:
“forever define the enemy as less than garbage,/his women as whores & gutter scum,/their children as thieves & beggars,/the men as rapists, child molesters & cannibals,/their civilization as savage and/beautifully primitive.”
It is a poem that ends with the admonition: “Instruct your holy men/to curse violence while/proclaiming the Land Safe/introducing/the thousand-year Reign of the Victors/as your Scholars/re-write the history.”
Walker offers a poem titled “Hope” in which she cautions anyone — herself? Israelis? — to avoid the temptation to benefit from the oppression of the weak. It begins: “Hope never/to covet/the neighbors’ house/with the fragrant/garden/from which a family/has been/driven by your soldiers..” It includes the lines:
“Hope never/to say yes/to their misery./Hope never to gaze/down into their faces/from what used to be/their rooftop.”
The children of Gaza, asserts Heba Gowayed, an associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College, deserve to survive—and much more. She writes:
“They deserve more than to simply be unmolested by the whims of tyrants. They deserve futures, joyful futures. They deserve to babble and giggle with their parents. They deserve to live free, from the river to the sea.”
For Gaza's Children: Black, Brown and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out is available at bookstores and through the Third World Press website.